Help me make a purchase!

[archanix]

I have been researching and trying to settle on which powerbook to purchase. Why is this so hard? Anyways, I've been thinking about doing the 12" with the 20" cinema display. However, I'm not sure if the 12" will be strong enough graphically to handle it. I know both the 15" and the 17" have the better cards in them. Should I just screw the display and get a 17"? AHH the decisions. I'm a student majoring in graphic design and it is required that we own powerbooks for some of our studio classes. It would really be nice to have the 12" for its portability to school and then bring it home and have lots of workspace with the 20" display. I wish I could wait until the new 12" g5 powerbooks came out. Unfortunately thats not an option because school starts back up in September. Let me know what you guys think. Any helpful guidance for this forum rookie is greatly appreciated.

Jesse

[staph]

Well, the native resolution of the new 20" display is 1680x1050, and from the technical overview PDF is this information on the Powerbook G4 12":

Dual display and video mirroring:Simultaneously supports up to 1024 by 768 pixels on the built-in display and up to 2048 by 1536 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors

So you should be fine. In fact, you could run a 23" monitor instead of a 20".

HTH

-S

[archanix]

awesome, so you think thats my best bet? going with the 12" with 20" display combo instead of just the 17" powerbook?

[archanix]

i don't think I will have the funds to go to the 23" unfortunately.

[Quagmire]

awesome, so you think thats my best bet? going with the 12" with 20" display combo instead of just the 17" powerbook?

I think it is your best bet. You have the 12" powerbook for its portabilty and size.When you need to do graphic stuff, just mate it with the 20" screen.

[archanix]

i'm going to get a 1gb dimm elsewhere for it considering its significantly lower in price. any online store recommendations? whats the difference between the ram they sell at apple and ram from the other stores?

[Quagmire]

i'm going to get a 1gb dimm elsewhere for it considering its significantly lower in price. any online store recommendations? whats the difference between the ram they sell at apple and ram from the other stores?

I would try crucial.com. They have lifetime warranty so if that ram ever goes bad it will be free to replace. Make sure that you get a notebook dim not a desktop.

[DMBand0026]

awesome, so you think thats my best bet? going with the 12" with 20" display combo instead of just the 17" powerbook?

Absolutely that's your best bet. The 12" has plenty of screen real estate for when your in class, and having that extra 20" outside of class will be great. The GPU in the 12" will have no problems driving two displays.

It has the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 (with 64MB DDR), I know it's not an amazing card, but it certainly gets the job done. That said, I know absolutely noting about GPUs, but I know I do some heavy PS, FCP, Illustrator...ect, work on my 12" and it takes everything I can throw at it.

Another plus, you can't beat the deal on one of those things since your a student. I got the 12" fully loaded. Make sure you get the 5400RPM 80GB HDD too, that'll be important for you. And load it up with RAM, at least 786MB, but do what I did and get third party RAM, cause Apple's is way too expensive. Check out Crucial (http://www.crucial.com) for the best RAM out there, they also guarantee it and the prices aren't bad. Can't beat that :)

Good luck with your purchase :)